Dear Mr. President: Can You Hear Me Now?

Just rang off with a retired spook. Not a friend, exactly, more like an acquaintance. Okay, a source. Back in the day. Asked him straight off, anyone taping this conversation?

"Yeah," he says, "me."

Other than you?

"What I always tell you?" He meant when we first met, me a newspaper hack. Translation: when we first began using each other to further our respective agendas and careers. I remember now like I remembered then, words to live by in the business: Never, ever, put it in writing. Never say it on a phone if you can help it, particularly a cell phone. Always meet in person. Doesn't mean every conversation needs to be a Chin Gigante walk-and-talk. But like Jimmy Breslin once told me, "You got feet and ears and eyes, you don't need nuthin' else."

So anyway, I say to the spook, How I know what they got on me? They, of course, being the shadowy men and women operating the government listening apparatuses and the craven private communications outfits who are in bed with them. Verizon. Google. The same government listening devices that have been draped over the country's communications grid like a tarantula's sticky silk stocking since about half past J. Edgar Hoover. The ones that tightened so hard after 9-11 that a jamoke like Edward Snowden feels compelled to blow the game open.

"They got everything," the spook says. "They always have. I tell you a million times."

He has. And I lived and worked by that ethos, knew I was on their list from my earliest reporting trips to Cuba, Liberia, Haiti. Each time I called my wife from Iraq, I assumed they were listening. Each time I rang my editor from Afghanistan, I assumed they were listening. I told the boss of this magazine that once I use words like "Al Qaeda," "terrorist," "bombs," "Taliban," over the phone with him, he's in it too. Part of the business. But the entire country's calls and emails? The civilians'? Every time my teenage son dials his Verizon phone and punches in the number of the girlfriend I'm not supposed to know about? Jesus.

Right now I'm of two minds.

On the one hand, the concept of spymasters eavesdropping on their own citizens, no matter who appointed them, is the slickest road to Goebbels. For exposing this NSA scandal, I suppose I should be grateful to Edward Snowden. Those who gain illicit power inevitably use, and misuse, that power; it's as axiomatic as Machiavelli and Acton predicted. Do I think our current president would personally resort to bag men and wet work as easily as would, say, a skel like Nixon? No. Do I think his henchmen would? Yes. The bottom line is, if the Feds want to get you, they will . . . or make your life hell if they cannot. (Think an IRS audit.) And if this is the way they are going to get us, I believe we have the right to know.

That said, for all my paranoia, I have chosen to be a member of the political commonwealth of the United States of America—key word: commonwealth—and unlike the conservatariat, I do not see the state as a fundamentally flawed actor. I believe the government we have put in place and maintained through (mostly) fair and free elections—a government embodied by firemen and teachers and mailmen and soldiers as well as spooks—is for the most part doing the best it can to protect and serve us, its ultimate boss. Despite the myriad of morons, grifters, perverts, and spalpeens elected to federal office, it is a government I must identify with and support. Which means supporting and trusting those elected officials—including the morons, grifters, perverts, and spalpeens—who have been given the power of oversight on the spooks. It is difficult. But I must try to believe, or all is lost.

I hope Edward Snowden saw the opportunity to expose the breadth of our country's spying on itself as an opportunity to trigger an open debate about the best way to balance personal privacy and national security in a world tainted by the fringe obscenities of a medieval religion, and not merely as a vindictive stab at damaging a body politic he opposes.

I hope Edward Snowden will voluntarily surrender to face charges. And perhaps when I know more about his motives, I will support him in the same way I supported Daniel Ellsberg, who also knew the risks and consequences of releasing the Pentagon Papers, and faced them head-on.

As Ellsberg said while surrendering to federal prosecutors who charged him with violating the Espionage Act of 1917, "I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision."

That Snowden is still on the run overseas gives me pause. That our country, my country, has used the occasion of 9-1-1 to edge closer and closer to a security state scares me more.

It would seem that we have been granted an opportunity right now to remedy that mission creep.

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